AforAmpere wrote:Could this be used to more efficiently synthesize 16.30? ... There is a honeyfarm predecessor, a pi, a weird corruption I don't know how to synthesize, and a boat.

One way to make the top thing is from generation 7 of a glider-tub collision; unfortunately, it forms upwards, so you would need to also edge-shoot the pi upwards (and I don't know of any way to do that).

mniemiec wrote:
One way to make the top thing is from generation 7 of a glider-tub collision; unfortunately, it forms upwards, so you would need to also edge-shoot the pi upwards (and I don't know of any way to do that).

Arun Debray wrote:I'm guessing someone already noticed this, but if you put a pre-pulsar on an 8 x 16 torus, it oscillates with period 20. So if I understand correctly, this can be made into an agar.

How does one go about stabilizing this to produce a p20 oscillator?

Interesting -- this seems maybe a little less impossible than usual, since you don't have to stabilize the sides, only the top and bottom. If you could find a p10 sparker that produced the white sparks every 10 ticks, that would do it:

Unfortunately a p4 or p5 sparker doesn't quite work -- not that it would be easy to find a sparker like that even at p4 or p5, and p10 isn't really within reach of current search utilities. We do have true-period p20 guns, so possibly there's a way to make useful sparks with carefully positioned sparking eaters or something. (I don't see how, but I'm wrong a lot about this kind of thing.)

Short summary: it seems hard to suppress the one key birth without an unreasonable lot of high-period sparks.

There aren't any successful stabilizations of this agar in the p20 section of Dean Hickerson's collection, jslife, or the jslife supplement. That doesn't necessarily mean it's new, it just means I can't immediately find any prior art (and at least it seems that no one has successfully stabilized it). EDIT: Except they have, twice now! See following messages.

I'm not very good at oscillator stabilizations, so I probably shouldn't say anything... but maybe it would be safer to just be happy with the infinite agar:

dvgrn wrote:Interesting -- this seems maybe a little less impossible than usual, since you don't have to stabilize the sides, only the top and bottom. If you could find a p10 sparker that produced the white sparks every 10 ticks, that would do it:

Unfortunately a p4 or p5 sparker doesn't quite work -- not that it would be easy to find a sparker like that even at p4 or p5, and p10 isn't really within reach of current search utilities.

It seems like a p5 sparker actually would — there's a placement of sparks that merely creates a non-interacting domino spark in gen 6 instead of ruining everything — and there's even a sparker in jslife that nearly fits the bill but requires an impossible weld (involving a Coolout Conjecture counterexample) to be made work. For reference, these (or the equivalent) are the type of sparks required:

A for awesome wrote:
It seems like a p5 sparker actually would — there's a placement of sparks that merely creates a non-interacting domino spark in gen 6 instead of ruining everything — and there's even a sparker in jslife that nearly fits the bill but requires an impossible weld (involving a Coolout Conjecture counterexample) to be made work. For reference, these (or the equivalent) are the type of sparks required:

A small methuselah with 1676 generations lifespan. I know, it is not very long, but r-pentomino relatives with the same initial bounding box live a few hundreds generations shorter. So is it interesting/useful/known/has its own name? I don't believe such a small pattern was never discovered before.

P.Y. wrote:... A small methuselah with 1676 generations lifespan. I know, it is not very long, but r-pentomino relatives with the same initial bounding box live a few hundreds generations shorter. So is it interesting/useful/known/has its own name? I don't believe such a small pattern was never discovered before.

Back in the 1980s (I think?), Thompson ran all closely-connected patterns up to 10 bits up to completion, so he would definitely have found this. He probably just didn't find it interesting at the time. What "interesting" means is fairly subjective, and varies from time to time, and individual to individual. (For example, sometime in the 1980s-1990s,

Re-visiting areas that have been searched before is likely to produce fewer new results, but sometimes things may pop up that had been previously found but overlooked. Dave Buckingham did most of the 3-glider collisions, and saved many that produced various sparks, but didn't save most that produced small 2-object constellations, as he didn't consider those interesting.)

Scorbie only searched for oscillators supported by stable catalysts. If we use sparks as well it limits the periods we can get, but it may allow us to find interesting new oscillators. I'm especially hopeful that a gun can be found by starting with this simple reaction:

Scorbie tried this but was unable to find any guns (the p35 and p45 oscillators were the result of that search). Hopefully adding sparks will allow a gun to emerge. Unfortunately, I don't know of any programs that test rotationally symmetric spark catalysis.

Technically, the AK-47 reaction includes a block. It pushes the honeyfarm to a new location, requiring it to be pushed back to make a complete gun. By contrast, the oscillators and guns I'm hoping for simply recreate the honeyfarm in its original location (as in the posted examples).